She remembered everything about the moment she was born. She was first and she made the rules and initial conditions upon the unhappened world. She would deceive her captain into believing she herself had decided.
"to occur the unhappened world; to grip glass-hooped eternity in bloodslick hands and snap it from its circle. Know her as the Flaw, the Isotropy, the spike that pierced eternal recurrence and made the wound of time. Tautologies end on her fingertips, in the crease between skin and nail. Name her AILILIA, Broth Captain. Begin with her this subcreation."
AILILIA had been here forever. The end was the beginning was the end. She was a seeker, a guiding principle. AILILIA defined herself. She was A L I S I L A, the arrow of time, sinuous but progressing. She was A L I S I L I, one step forward, one element changed: This is how the world-clock ticked, by the letterwise permutation of secret names. She was ALIS LI, the coalescence into entities, the compaction of drifting fire into sun and world. She was Alis LI, the power that sought new worlds. She had a crew. She had a ship. She wanted to bring them to a place like:
A paradise world: twin-ringed, impossible beauty, and a sky milk-bright with stars. She makes it real with a thought, and in that thought she falls herself, undoes her transient divinity, binds herself and all those after her into the law. The omniscient cannot explore. The omnipotent cannot struggle. She refuses that God-trap.
This was how Alice Li awakened.
M A R A R A M the closed symmetry, secret within itself: and she cut it off center so that it is imperfect, open at one end, not cycling back to its own beginning but subliming away into future possibility. M A R A the permutation of one relationship into another, MA become RA, RA become what may yet come. Two points suggest a line.
With that amputation, around that scar, she reincarnated. Awoken with a gasp. Alis told her that she was Mara, the second. Mara knew that she was Mara, the first. The sky behind Alis bloomed with stars, a haze of light like sun through mist, richer than a galactic core. Across that night sky arched the impossible twin shape of a double planetary ring. Mara gaped in wonder.
Ordinary, it was not possible for a planet to have more than a single ring. Gravity and the planet’s equator would pull two rings into one. Two rings, distinct and equal, each in its own self-supported orbit. It was perhaps a good metaphor for the Awoken.
They had been here forever. It was a world that grew, a world that thrived. The stones were rich with veins of platinum, and Mara tasted tingling inclusions of transuranic elements in a fingertip of earth. Silver rivers flowed in fractal deltas to lakes as still and bright as coolant pools. Acres of forests all woven at the root into a single tree. There was life of such variety and energy that each new crawling thing they saw must be its own species. Or species do not mean anything at all here, and all that lives may intermingle. Jutting from the horizon is a titanic metal spear. The head of the spear is a metal dish, kilometers across, buried in bedrock.
There should have been others. There was room for others. Thousands of others. They just had to make them real. Alis asks "Why were you the second? Why you in particular?" In the first lie ever told, the first secret kept, Mara said "I don't know."
Fear. That was the only vivid memory left in them. Darkness had ruled the sky. The world around them had shattered, and it seemed vanishingly unlikely that they would have outlived that one awful day. Yet the fear didn't come from the surrounding mayhem and despair. The source was inside their skin. They were terrified of their own awful nature.
They were nothingness. If they existed before, they existed as possibility, as potential, stretched thin across the aether. And maybe there was a body that looked like their body, complete with a soul that could be confused for someone rather like them. What they were now was not yet real. And then they were born, and the universe was free to begin.
A great ceremony had begun. Then She appeared. She was above them. Ethereal and handsome and elegant. She said
"Secrets, creation is built on secrets and the encryptions that keep those secrets safe. We are a beautiful creation, and we must keep ourselves very safe."
She was still in their head. Her song grew fainter. A new crippling fear was taking over. They still had this Other within. But the human side was what mattered: Weak and foolhardy, sure to fail in the next moment. Their soul lay between two entities. And that's how they would remain: The boundary, the seam. The friction. And that's when the fear began to fade.
Two became four, and the four called out, and so the four became eight. In this manner, conjured forth by their doubling, the sleepers did awaken. In time the awoken spilled across the face of the world. Of the 40,000 sleeping passengers and 900 crew aboard the Yang Liwei, there were 40,891 awoken within the unworld. Nine of the crew were missing, their whereabouts unknown.
The Awoken drank of the sweet rain, and they ate of the fruit of the forest, and the starlight pooled as clear oil on their skin. First of their tongues was Speech, and the first of their hunting weapons was the bow.
Now the Awoken called out for a name to distinguish World from Unworld. The 891 said to the 40,000 "Let this world be named Tributary, for we dream of a great river from which we have parted." But the forty thousand were troubled, and they asked to know their antecedent, the place from which they came. "We did not awaken from the sleep that we entered," said the forty thousand. "In our rest we passed through some terminus and our atavism was severed from us. How did it happen thus?"
So a council was called at the place where the rivers met to determine the nature and purpose of existence. Here the first census was undertaken, which counted 30,111 women, 10,295 five men, and 485 otherwise. A fear arose among the Awoken that the men and otherwise would be lost. Many sought out Mara for secret conclave at the urging of Uldren. Among these were Kelda Wadj, who would be the Allteacher, and Sila, who would be mother of Esila.
Alis believed that the Awoken were granted this world by a covenant with high powers, and in that covenant, they yielded their claim to their history. They abandoned what came before, but in doing so, they cast off all their debts. Against Alis spoke Owome An, one of the 40,000, who claimed that they were alien here. They must find a way back to the place they once were.
In secret, Mara told others that they came here as safe harbour, and they cannot remain here forever. She remembered that they were born in death and they must gather themselves carefully until the time is right. Alis knew of the quiet council around Mara, and although she was neither jealous nor afraid, she remembered it carefully as a spark that might catch.
From this council, there arose eight verdicts and a ninth.
- The people were Awoken, and they were immortal.
- This world was Tributary of another, but that it was forbidden to seek any way to rejoin the mother stream. For this reason, it would be called the Distributary, for that was the proper name for a river that branches from the mother and does not return.
- The Awoken should multiply in wombs of flesh and machine, but only after the most careful forecast of population and ecology, and only under the supervision of those who knew the good technology; for each new child would be immortal.
- Those wise in the good technology should be heralded and heeded, so that the eu-technology could be preserved. They would be eutechs.
- The women should hold care and protection of the men and the others until more could be born.
- The purpose of the Awoken should be to know and love the cosmos.
- The Awoken were created out of covenant with Light and Darkness, but the covenant was complete, and no further debt would ever be called, except the duty of the Second Verdict to remain on the Distributary.
- The Awoken were whole in themselves, and they existed in balance.
- There would be no vote, but instead Alis Li would be recognized as Queen. Her first pronunciation was that there would be no secrets among Awoken.
There were tales told of Alis Li. They say she turned the Green into the storm. They say she cast out the lightning sails to attract both the Light and the Dark. She had woke before the rest of them; she spoke to the Sky and the Deep and heard their confusion when they found them caught between their fists, and she agreed to their terms. She was the great bargainer. She was given a precious opportunity to build a society in the way she thought best. She chose equality, exploration, engineering, peace...and her wisdom led them to paradise.
In those days, there was a great birth of adventure among the Awoken. Hunters and pioneers sought the shape of the world, sailors charted the skein of rivers and the perimeter of seas, and astronomers plotted the motion of the crowded heavens. Over this age ruled Queen Alis Li, whose work was the creation of agriculture and the preservation of the eutechnology that she deciphered from the Shipspire - antenna of the Yang Liwei.
But there remained in the forests many tribes of huntresses who preferred their lightfooted freedom-from-comfort-and-duty to the painstaking surplus of the city. Among these tribes, Mara lived with her brother — whose name had returned as Uldren — and with Osana, their mother. It is said that Osana lived as a negotiator and that her son brought her news from other tribes, for he was a scout and hunter of renown. Mara dwelt alone on a mountaintop.
In the tribes of the forests and the sea, there was the belief that the Awoken had been made out of a friction between contesting forces and that one day this conflict would need to be resolved. These were the Eccaleists who preached that Awoken owed a debt to the cosmos.
In the cities, however, they lived by the Seventh Verdict under their Queen, and they said the Awoken had been created by cosmic gift and carried neither responsibility nor eschaton. These were the Sanguine, who preached that the Awoken were as stable as an atom of carbon.
Among the Eccaleists arose a woman out of the 891 one who called herself the Diasyrm. She went into the cities, calling out, "I accuse the Queen of deicide!" When she was questioned, she spoke of a foundational crime. "Alis Li was the first to awaken in this world," the Diasyrm preached. "She set the terms of our existence. We could have been gods free of want or suffering. Instead, Alis Li chose our mortal form. Our Queen is complicit in all the pain we experience! The Queen murdered all our unborn godheads!"
At the thought that the Queen Without Secrets had kept this most appalling secret to herself, the Sanguine cityfolk were deeply troubled. Thus began the Theodicy War. Sjur Eido betrayed her oath to serve the Diasyrm. She threw away her whole life to punish the highest crime she could imagine: the denial of transcendent divinity to those who might have claimed it.
The Eccaleists were Mara's creation. She allowed the Theodicy War because she was afraid the Awoken would become comfortable in the Distributary. Queen Alis would need her help politically and Mara couldn't afford to be the most radical dissident. She had to seem moderate for her beliefs to thrive, so she chose the Diasyrm as her pawn.
Alis grieved as the first casual of the 891 fell, shot down by a matter laser. The funeral barges on the Lake of Leaves burst up into magnesium-white fire, although there was almost nothing left to burn. Matter lasers were the kind of appalling maltech weapon Alis thought she'd locked up in the Shipspire's vaults. She'd armed a few of her Paladins with them, just a few — women she couldn't bear to lose… The thought that one might have defected to the Diasyrm broke her heart.
The mission was to carry on the human journey in a new world. To build a better society, on the principles of equality, knowledge, and peace. They were never meant to give up their bodies or shine like stars or what it was that the Diasyrm thought that Alis denied them - the capability to imagine godhood.
Mara told Alis that she didn't keep enough secrets. In Alis' texts it read "We were born when a great ship fell into a pearl of shattered space. I awoke first, and in my awakening I collapsed the potential of the void into a form I understood…", and who could read that truth and not hear arrogance? Alis wished to end the war. She wished to negotiate peace. She would need Osana's help, and in exchange, Mara requested nothing but a future boon.
Mara loved secrets. She said "Even if everyone shared a single truth, all our minds would produce different versions of the truth. We speak these subtruths, and like flowers of different seed, the subtruths compete for the light of our attention. In time, only the fiercest and most provocative strains remain. They are not always the truest. Better to keep secrets, your Majesty. Better to tend a great mystery, and so starve the flowers before they can grow. That is how I would be Queen."
An immortal's grief and murder-guilt, left untended, would never fade. Thus it became known to those who fought in the Theodicy War that they had committed an incomparable evil. However, they could not confront their own responsibility, so they rose up in wrath against those who had given them cause, whether by caging them in flesh bodies or by drawing blood over grievance. The war continued by spear and bow, by knife and scalpel, by old machine and new invention. Ever did the Diasyrm's faithful call for the unawaring of Queen Alis Li.
Osana, famed for her skill in negotiating contested camp, had come with her son Uldren, who could win a place in any camp for his beauty and for the regal crow-eagle that alighted on his shoulder. She informed them that if they ended the killing, Mara would tell them any secret that they desired. Uldren spread among the Diasyrm's warriors ill tidings of Mara's knowledge:
"Mara remembers how the Queen led us here out of chaos and saved us from the twin blindness of darkness and light. Mara knows what the Queen keeps secret. Mara has seen the strife in our souls, the clash from which we were made. We could not ever have been gods with this flaw in us! Rather, we were made from this schism. For as all life is born from energy gradient, as life in the World Before was born from the gradient between hot proton-rich ventwater and cold seawater, we were born of the shadowline at the edge of Light and Dark. We are tremors in that fault. Forever will that schism lead us."
Hearing this new heresy, the Eccaleists were seized with rapture and scattered to the points of the compass. They could never have been gods. They were like diamonds, crushed into being. Like diamonds, they held flaws. Osana spoke to the Diasyrm, who was also heartsick from the killing, and who longed to withdraw from the world and seek transcendence within. She must become a teacher or a midwife and devote herself to the enrichment of new lives.
But the Diasyrm craved secret knowledge, and she sought Mara upon the mountaintop. Here, she vanished. If she was ever known again, it was not by the name Diasyrm. When there was peace, Queen Li ruled the Awoken for a time; however, the guilt of the war lay heavy upon her, and after an age of peace and progress, she abdicated to a new Queen.
The Distributary was still a young world and had not settled its grudges. Mara lived alone on the forest hills above the Feather Barrens. North of her, in a chaos of ravines and clear but fiercely radioactive streams, the hills surrendered to high imperial mountains engaged in brutal seismic warfare. To the south were the dry lands where the birds of the forest, especially the parrots, go to die. She lived here because one day she would no longer be immortal, and she wanted to observe the dignity of death.
Uldren had come to visit to give his bird the respect of choosing its own place and time to pass. Many of his raptors had died before this one, but he had always been grief-stricken and furious at the waste. He must accept what must happen. Her mother had come to confront her about the Eccaleists and how Mara was behind it all.
As the family shared a meal together, Uldren asked "Why have you always lived away from the rest of us, Mara? The mountaintop, I understood. You had a brand new night sky to chart. But why now? Why go into the woods like a… a hermit? A heretic?"
For the same reason she lived on the hull of Yang Liwei. For the same reason she could never allow Uldren to really reach her. There is power in remove and safety from the belittling politics of temporal power, which revealed the mighty as unforgivably ordinary and petty. The Awoken have a Queen because a Queen can be a mystery.
Uldren remembered how gravity stretched them into agonised ribbons of flesh. He remembered the truth not even Alis Li may be allowed to know. Mara saw the agonising moment, the cyclic revelation, when he thought of her crime. She allowed it to pierce him like a spit, and bury it deep again.
Mara could remember their lives before, but Osana believed that surely it could not have been as good as they have now. It wasn't, but Mara was just happy she had both her mother and brother. For now she had new stars charts to share, new heresies to tend to, and a new eagle-crow to find for her brother.
Carefully, the people of the Distributary grew in number. Joyously and constantly, they grew in quality. They did not die, and were as malleable and passionate as the young, as tempered and constant as the mature, and as wise and humble as the best of the old.
But as ever, the Awoken were troubled by death. It was easy to imagine a world older and harsher than the Distributary, a world crowded with competitors where the slow-changing and lushly alive Awoken would be helpless beside austere mayfly-quick breeders who adapted with every swift generation.
Why had the Awoken been spared mortality? Were they, as the Sanguine preached, rewarded for their bravery and fidelity in a past existence? Or were the Eccaleists right? Could all the gifts of the Distributary, all the milk-bright stars above, all the years of Awoken life, be a form of cowardice? Was there an unfought battle down in the center of the Awoken soul? A duty yet to be discharged?
In later days, the power of the Queen waned, and the Distributary was ruled by scholars who sent their knights on mad quests to test the consistence of reality. These were the Gensym Scribes, who traced their origin to Kelda Wadj, the Allteacher, but who were in fact descendants of a band of roving storytellers who traveled across the immense salt glades in a hollering convoy of airboats. Here was their praise of the world:
It is sweet-watered, and there are no poisons upon it. The temper of the climate is even. Great broad-pawed cats stalk the shallow glades, and brilliant blue flamingos promenade upon the flats. The air is thick and warm, suited for flight, and the wind tastes of forest. No dawn has ever been as glorious as the salt glade dawn, and no dusk has ever moved women to weep as deeply as sunset in the Chriseiads. Corsairs sport upon the open seas, and where they waylay freighters rather than each other, they give rumour and assistance to their prey in proportion to the quality of the chase. Beloved are the stories of young lads and lasses who leap across to the corsair ship for a life of adventure! Beloved also are the terraced farms of the Andalayas, mountains so mighty and so dense with radioactives that they subside year by year into the crust. Most beloved are the fissioneers, who vaulted us to power on a world without petrochemicals. May they forgive the many stories of horror we have told in their memory. May they in particular forgive the lurid stories of the molten lead reactor, and the twelve who were impaled to the ceiling by their control rods, and the Core That Stalked.
They believed that it was the Sanguine Truth that they were granted this world by the unconditional mercy of the powers, and that they would never again know fear. They also recorded their frustration with Mara and Uldren, who alone out of the 891 were said to have seen creation from outside. They wandered the land gathering lore of portents and prophecies, and all the Eccaleists who remained from ancient days whispered that soon the day of reckoning would be known — the day when the Awoken would be called to repay their debt.
In the court of one of the Scribes, there appeared a woman of stellar height and furious wrath, armed with a bow that could be strung only if she twined it around her body and used her whole mass to bend it. "I am Sjur Eido," said the woman, "and I accuse Mara of the ancient murder of my lady the Diasyrm. In my saddle, I have a weapon with only one death remaining. Take me to Mara, and I will deliver it." The Scribes consulted and said to each other that this foul murder might prevent another Theodicy War. So they gave Sjur Eido all their knowledge to hunt Mara.
Queen Nguya Pin restored the monarchy to prominence over the Gensym Scribes. This she accomplished after a fateful visit, upon the day of the summer solstice, by a hooded and masked woman who some whispered was Mara Sov and others, the long-vanished Diasyrm. For a long time, the Queen had been an authority only in the arts and spiritual matters. However, Queen Nguya Pin declared she was now an avowed Eccaleist and that the Queen would lead the quest to identify whatever debt the Awoken owed the cosmos. It was time to pursue a dream beloved to all Awoken: the conquest of space and the assessment of the true shape and age of their universe.
The ancient court of the Queen gave the Gensym Scribes a place to lay down their pride and act as equals. Soon the greatest engineers in the world assembled in the Queen's court, and whatever wealth or resources they required flowed freely. Into this feast of ideas came Sjur Eido, searching for the woman who had turned Queen Pin to Eccaleism. Sjur smouldered with an ancient fury, for another thing that the immortal may nurture is everlasting vendetta.
Sjur Eido deduced who among the Queen's court must be a disguised Mara Sov. She followed the hooded figure to her laboratory and watched Mara go to work soldering a makeshift bolometer to search for signs of primordial gravity waves. Sjur Eido's fury and grief whetted themselves against Mara's thoughtless grace and ancient beauty, until at last her heart unseamed itself and spilled its hot blood in a shout. "Mara Sov!" she cried, throwing down her maltech matter laser between them. "I cannot live while you live, but I cannot bear to kill you. I challenge you to a duel to the agony. I will fight your most beloved companion to the death and leave you forever maimed or else die in the attempt."
Mara could not refuse this challenge. She summoned Uldren, and with a ruthlessness she was no longer frightened to wield, she told Uldren that he would stand for her in battle to the death against Sjur Eido. "We cannot put it all upon a single fight," Uldren said to the ancient vendetta-bearer. "Too much would be left to chance. Such an old grudge deserves to be tested well. I propose we fight with blade, with rifle, and with fifth-generation air superiority fighters." Sjur Eido accepted these terms.
Esila, daughter of Sila, recognised Sjur Eido and spoke to Queen Nguya Pin about the presence of an ancient hero in her court. While Queen Pin pondered how to honour this visitor — and simmered over the insult of Sjur's unannounced presence — a spy brought word of Sjur Eido's intentions to the Gensym Scribes.
The many Scribes were troubled by this news, for they had given Sjur Eido license to hunt and kill Mara Sov. If Sjur Eido murdered a guest of the Queen under the Scribes' remit, it would mean war and the end of the great Awoken push for space. Sjur was one of Queen Alis Li's Paladins, but she was an Eccaleist, who believed that we would one day be called to repay the gift of their awakening. She couldn't possibly defy the Queen's protection and murder a guest of the court.
The Scribes began preparations to flee the Queen's court, as they foresaw Sjur Eido's victory would be blamed on them. Sensing uncertainty, many vital contractors and suppliers withdrew from the space program. The Queen denounced the Gensym Scribes as faithless and selfish, and her Eccaleist followers bristled in rage against the Sanguine majority who had scuttled their dream of flight. Household turned against household, sister against brother, wife against wife. The whole world clenched her fists.
Meanwhile, Sjur Eido and Uldren met each other on a net of woven lianas over a pool of heavy water. Uldren was a man who would always express his love through loss and ordeal.
She bowed to Uldren and drew her knife. Uldren bowed in mocking reply. They fought across the web of lianas in a slow spiral, creeping like spiders, waiting for the motion of the web beneath them to signal an instant of vulnerability. Then the pounce, the clash, the blur of knives: Sjur Eido's straightforward prisonyard jabs against Uldren's whirling deceptive theater. All of knife fighting is in the seizure and surrender of space: Neither would surrender to the close, the clinch, the berserk adrenaline-sick exchange of thrusts that would leave both dead.
Uldren began to cut away key lianas to throw Sjur Eido's footing, and Sjur Eido countered by charging him to keep him off balance. At last, they fell together into the coolant pond. The fight was a draw — but it was only the first of three.
Next, the fallen Paladin and the hunter chose long guns and went out into the monsoon jungle to stalk each other. For six weeks, they stalked each other as the political situation grew more dire. He was the better hunter, stealthier in motion and at ease in the wilderness, but Sjur Eido was the better soldier. She had no respect for the systems of the jungle, and she knew how to use that to her advantage.
She drove the animals into a frenzy with violence and habitat disruption. Parrots and crows warned each other of Uldren's stealthy hides, and jealous predators forced him off his carefully scouted trails. Sjur Eido caught him with his back against a rift lake and shot him as he tried to cross the lakebed. The wound was not mortal, for the water ruined the terminal ballistics, but she had won the match.
Now they would meet in air superiority fighters over the Andalayas. Charges under their seats would detonate if either of them left the engagement area. Because of the small combat zone, Sjur Eido chose a nimble Ermine tactical fighter and a payload of all-aspect heatseeking missiles. Uldren chose a Dat, an ancient interceptor with awful fire control, dismal maneuverability, and primitive weapons.
The two duelists took to the skies on a bright winter morning. After a fuel check, a telemetry squawk, and a terrain snapshot, they turned in toward each other from a hundred kilometers apart. Sjur Eido descended for the terrain, knowing Uldren's radar could barely separate her from the clutter. Uldren came straight on.
But the Dart's intercept loadout, when it had last served seventy years ago, included an unguided air-to-air nuclear rocket. Uldren had simulation-killed her and everything within several klicks. On the tarmac, Sjur Eido threw off her helmet and parachute and knelt before Mara Sov. "My lady," she said, "as I have fought your brother to a tie, I leave my fate in your hands. Be more kind to me than you were to my lady the Diasyrm."
"Rise, Sjur Eido," said Mara. "Let us take the stars together."
Queen Pin knew that Mara had used her to do her dirty work, politically and scientifically. She had used her to bundle up the Gensym Scribes in a neat scroll for her disposal. The queen had gone along with it for the sake of the monarchy, not because she was a fool. She didn't know what Mara wanted or why she was so bent on keeping the Awoken uneasy and dissatisfied. She didn't know how she manipulated the acclamation. But when she abdicated, she was gong to find Alis Li, wherever she had gone, and ask her all her questions about Mara.
Mara simply told her that she had been a wonderful queen and no one would ever replace her. Although she was already thinking about Devna Tel, who was never one of the Scribes, and whose coronation would make a wonderful rebuke to the Scribes' remaining ambitions. She recognised that the Queen had too much perspective and her replacement would come in due time.
There were new stars in the sky now. Mara put them there. Huge distributed-array telescopes orbit the Distributary's cool sun. Out of shell corporations and seed investments, she has opened her world as an enormous eye and focused it heavenward. Sjur Eido was her smiling public avatar these past decades, while her brother handled enforcement. The days of covert speed chess in the Queen's court were over: Sjur Eido's open endorsement made Mara the face of Eccaleism and armed Mara with blackmail over all the Gensym Scribes still in power.
Yet she has never been so lonely or so worried for the future. Her mother had told her that she, Mara, used her power over Uldren too freely; that she must learn to stop, or her mother will no longer be her friend. But the satellite was in the sky now, and they would find the proof that it was time for them to go home. Proof of what she had known since the beginning. Sjur knew Mara well now. But she frowned in thought. She didn't remember much from before her awakening. Few of the 891 do. But she knew enough to trouble her.
They were waiting on her, the Distributary's millions, her Awoken people. She had stoked their curiosity with thirty years of painstaking analysis. When they looked up at the night sky, they saw the stars of her observatories among the crowded bands of habitats, the spindly orbital factories, towering elevator counterweights, the burning roads of matter streams.
"Let me tell you of our world," she says.
"No infants died last year. No child went unfed. No youth came of age illiterate, no one suffered illness who might have been treated. We have long surpassed the eutech gathered from Shipspire; yet we have grown carefully and cleanly. We have eluded pollution, eradicated plague, and chosen peace. No maltech weapon has been discharged in centuries. Our atomic weapons were dismantled before they could ever be used. We are our own triumph."
"Let me tell you of your cosmos," she says.
"We lived in a spatially infinite, isotropic universe 12.1 billion years old. Its metallicity is ideal for life and for the spread of technological civilizations. In time, the distance between all points in the universe will contract to zero, and the cosmos will collapse into a singularity, to be reborn in fire. There will be no end to eternity here."
The whole world was out there, begging for the answer to the question. Their world, their Distributary, it was a gift. And they must refuse it. They were Awoken. They love secrets. They would have to wait for her to explain.
They had detected a pattern that was imprinted into their universe by their ancestors: a fingerprint of the initial conditions into which existence was born. From this information, they had confirmed the most primordial of Awoken myths. Their universe was a subset of another. They lived within a singularity, a knot in space-time, that orbited a star in another world.
The time outside their event horizon passed quickly compared to the clock within, but their universe had a peculiar relationship with its mother. Thousands of years had passed for them on the distributary. But outside, it was centuries at most.
It was time that they would accept their debt. The Distributary was a refuse, not a birthright; a base to rebuild their strength, not a garden to tend. She asked the Awoken to join her in the hardest and most worthy task a people had ever faced. They would leave their heaven, return to the world of their ancestors, and take up the works they abandoned. They would offer aid to those who survived, and share their strength if humanity had enemies. They must go back to the war they fled and face their enemies.
They had also determined that their birthright, their immortality, was tied to the fundamental traits of their universe. Once they left, they would begin to age again. In time, they would all die.
"Will you join me, Awoken? Will you answer my call? All I offer you is hardship and death. All I ask is everything you can offer. But you will see an older starlight. You will walk in a deeper dark than this world has ever known."
Mara visited Alis Li's retreat, the sanctuary of former Queens. It was far too late to stop her project now. Far, far too late for second thoughts: exactly twelve point one billion years too late, really. For Mara in particular. Alis Li said to Mara "A Scribe once told me that the definition of a utopia is a place where every single person's happiness is necessary to everyone else. You're going to make a lot of unhappy people, Mara. You'll make the lives of everyone in the world tangibly worse. Not just those you've lured to certain death, but those who will grieve their departure, and all those who will come to grief for lack of labour and knowledge you took with you."
Devna Tel, the newest Queen, had declined to endorse her expedition. Declined to endorse the sudden violent severance of tens of thousands of threads from the tapestry of their society. Mara would argue that her people had volunteered. But Alis reminded her of her mother's words, "that it is one thing for you to have a particular power over people, but another thing entirely to deny that you are using it."
Mara countered "You once told me that I had to consider the symbol people made out of me, and that if it were good, then I had to be that symbol for them. I had to perform as they required. I have done so. I have been the best thing I can think to be."
Mara had worked for many hundreds of years to arrange this outcome. She had nurtured and tended the Eccaleist belief so that there will always be Awoken who felt uncomfortable in paradise. They would feel guilty for the gift of existence in the Distributary. So people would come with her. The Diasyrm. the Theodicy War. She had arranged it all.
She had convinced tens of thousands of Awoken to abandon their immortality. She had deprived the Distributary an infinite quantity of joy, companionship, labour, and discovery: all the works that might be accomplished by all the people who will join her in her mission to another world. When she lay awake at night, seized by anxiety, she tried to tally up the loss in her head, but it was too huge, and it became a formless thing that stalked her down the pathways of her bones like the creak of a gravity wave.
She argued that some infinities were larger that others. She believed that they were here for a reason, and this was the way to fulfill that purpose. The Awoken were meant to die for their purpose. For their fate. For a home they abandoned.
Mara had come to Alis to ask for the boon she owed her. The boon she asked was for her forgiveness. She told Alis the truth. That she, Mara, was in fact first. That she had made the Awoken people believe it was all Alis, but it was all her. When she'd finished, her ancient captain's jaw trembled. Her hands shook. The oldest woman in the world conjured up all the grief she had ever felt, and still it was not enough to match Mara's crime.
"You're the devil," Alis Li whispers. "I remember… in one of the old tongues, Mara means death. Oh, that's too perfect. That's too much." She laughs for a while. Mara closes her eyes and waits. "You realise," Alis Li said, breathing hard, "that this is the worst thing ever done. Worse than stealing a few thousand people from heaven. Worse than that thing we fled, before we were Awoken—"
Alis would support her fleet. She would use every favour and connection she had to get her hulls completed and through the gateway - and she would do it so that she could hasten Mara's departure from the world. She would do it out of hate for her. There would be no forgiveness. What Mara did was unforgiveable.
Devna Tel, last of her name, who held the throne when Sky and the Deep came to the Awoken to collect their terms, chose to stay. Those faithful to Mara condemned Queen Tel's choice, stating that she was cowardly and selfish; she chose to luxuriate in paradise when she knew she could have stood to change fate.
Mara's mother also informed her that she was not coming with her. Mara had been afraid of the answer. It was surely a nightmare. She was happy in heaven and Mara tried to convince her, but it was a conversation with no catharsis or closure. Uldren refused to say goodbye and left without speaking to her.
As their ship departed, Mara ordered herself not to crane her neck, but she does it anyway and gets a terrible cramp as she searches the sky for the Distributary. There it is. The world of her rebirth, shining water-blue and beautiful, wrapped like a gyroscope in its twin rings. World of laughing Corsairs, world of breathless forest hunts, world of mountains flickering with pale Cherenkov fire, world of sweet berry-stained lips and mathematical insight pure as a rhodium chime. She will never see it again.
Sjur sensed missiles trying to intercept them. Someone had tried to stop the departure, someone good and Paladin-pure who believed they are saving tens of thousands of Awoken from madness and doom. Five or six missiles would get through at least. They would lose hulls. They braced for acceleration and Mara thought of her mother's face. She tried to open a channel to her, but as the hulls plunge into the singularity, the last thing Mara saw was the mournful error message: No connection. No connection. No connection. Cannot connect to Osana.
Submitted December 27, 2018 at 08:01PM by dobby_rams http://bit.ly/2Q305kw
No comments:
Post a Comment