Asimov's Science Fiction: February 2014 (5 page)

"Are you ready, my prince?" she asked. Diviya shivered with excitement.
My Prince.
To be beside a princess, near the eerie strangeness of the Maw, was like being in a saga.

"I will lead you past the Maw," Diviya said.

"We are only two."

He found her suddenly young, although they were pressed and kilned in the same queen. She'd surely never questioned the powers who had cosseted her. She'd never had friends starved or beaten to death. Of course she was young.

"We must go," Diviya said, taking a star fix and comparing it to what he'd been taught by the souls. He was not taking their path.

Diviya understood the role of time dilation in the migration. Skates launched themselves into the future, leaping over generations of shaghāl whose population collapsed when bereft of prey. And when the skates established a new colony, few shaghāl were left to hunt them.

To the skates migrating around the Maw and back to the archipelago of asteroids, the trip lasted a single year. To the unmoving world, they were gone for seventeen. The skates coordinated their leap. Those who survived reunited not only in space, but also in time. Every acceleration and angle was perfectly calculated. The smallest error might leave a skate weeks, months, or even years from the rest of the migration.

But Diviya was not leading the princess seventeen years into the future. Their culture was bankrupt, built upon the broken carapaces of workers. No matter what happened, neither Diviya nor the princess would ever see anyone from their hive again. Shorter migrations were more dangerous, taking paths closer to the Maw and harder accelerations at perigee. Diviya had worked out the trajectories, without the help of his soul. He was leaping thirteen years into the future.

"Follow!" Diviya cried, over the protest of his soul. Diviya aimed into the hot clouds around the Maw and thrust.

Diviya and Abhisri had left the secretary, shaken in themselves. The secretary had issued remarkably detailed instructions to them on who he wanted watched among the workers. There was little doubt that should Diviya or Abhisri fail to report to him, their souls would be removed, and the two of them killed.

"Disincentive," the secretary had said, "is more reliable." Diviya and Abhisri had no intention of reporting on the workers, but they had a little time before they had to give something to the secretary. They passed messages to Esha and other work farm unionists. They struck secret committees, to plan a true strike, to grind the industry of the hive to a halt. They met in the worst of the shanties, where hive drones seldom passed.

The Hero precessed auspiciously from the Constellation of the Good Courtier to the Constellation of the Farmer, signaling the arrival of the longest night of the year. Workers could not move regolith without the shine of the Hero. Even the tax collectors were reluctant to push workers on the longest night, which became a time for singing and performing the snippets of the sagas in the regolith fields and the slums.

Diviya was with the workers' committee when the hive drones thrust in, carrying metal weights. They threw the weights just before landing, cracking workers. Diviya barely leapt out of the way. Workers scattered in terror as drones landed on them, striking ceramic with steel, tearing out wires that absorbed microwaves. Rows of hive drones ringed them.

Abhisri pushed Diviya into an alley filled with panicking workers. "Fly!" Abhisri said.

"I can't!"

"You're the only one who can! This is big! They don't know you carry breath."

A hive drone fell upon Abhisri, striking with a pick in its hard fingers. Diviya leapt on the drone, scratching and hitting. Diviya had never fought anything, and the drone was trained for this. The drone jerked, sending Diviya tumbling high in the microgravity. Below, the workers were awash in hive drones. They were lost.

Diviya exhaled a breath to correct his tumble as his trajectory carried him out of the slums. He thrust gently, turning, and settled to the regolith. A few skates, too weak or worn to work, saw him land, but did not move. They surely took him for some wayward tax farmer.

Even this far away, Diviya heard the panicked electrical sputtering of terrified skates. Friends and brothers. But the commands of the hive drones were louder, more calm, angry, and organized. Crackles of electrical static shot orders, some encoded. Abhisri was right. This was big. "Flee!" his soul said stridently. "Flee!" Diviya rocked back and forth on his fingers. He itched to run. To help. To run. His thoughts were jumbled. He feared he would only think of the right thing to do when it was too late. And he feared the sure beating. The work farms. The amputation of his soul. The true darkness of being a worker again, detached from a whole world he could only perceive through his soul.

They thrust hard. The princess flew close. Hot violet radiation bathed them as the hunger of the Maw's gravity sped them faster. They fell from heaven, like the Hero himself. The whole world shifted into the blue. The sounds of static came tight and high-pitched. Tense. Near the Maw, space itself feared, releasing ghostly sounds and strange discharges.

The searing cloud abraded Diviya. The keening of his soul heightened in pitch. Radiation and particle strikes corroded the little soul. It was not made to fly this close to the Maw. It was composed of so many different radioisotopes that no matter what struck it, some part of it changed to something inert or something inappropriately active. The soul was going mad.

They neared perigee. Their speed was terrifying. Stars multiplied, filling the sky. Their haunting chorus blended with the relentless screams of the souls.

"Pray!" Diviya yelled to the souls. "Pray!" They did. In warbling tones of panic, the souls recited the metronomic cadences of the liturgy. Diviya listened to the prayers as he never had before.

Diviya's carapace creaked. He was so close to the edge of the Maw that the difference in gravity from his ventral side to his dorsal threatened to crack him. And still the Maw accelerated him.

No sounds of the living world remained, except for the chanting of his soul, a simple prayer to a hero who had no authority here. A new, eerie ocean of slow echoes filled his senses. His stars, radiant microwave stars, were all gone. New stars appeared. They were dead, their glows constant and unblinking as the sleet of passing clouds flayed and scorched him. He counted time by the cadences of the souls' prayers.

The intensity of the radioactive hail burned his soul, making Diviya's exhaust so hot that it felt like riding a star. And the clay wafers that he carried, his gametic contribution to the future, hardened in the heat and pressure, forming the crystalline structures that could be laid over the wafers carried by the princess. The possibility of new life quickened in this crushing furnace. Diviya counted the prayers and then, at a precise moment, he redoubled his thrust.

Diviya could not hear the princess. He stayed fixed on the strange stars. If he looked back for her, they would both be lost. Among these ghost stars, he could only trust. If she had not been able to follow, everything they had suffered at home was for naught.

The Maw grasped at him, to crush, stretch, and snap him. The heat of Diviya's thrust burned his own carapace. The clouds of hot gas brightened. He became so fast that even the ghost stars became too blue to see. The acidic particles shooting at the Maw crowded out the darkness, filling Diviya's world.

Then the Maw flung Diviya away.

The clouds thinned, but did not cool. Each grain floating in his path zipped into his carapace at nearly the speed of light. The world was eerie. He had left the Maw, but not the land of the dead. Strange purple colors and warped, fluid sounds drifted past him. He was a ghost and the living world had closed itself to him.

Yet amidst this dislocation, far away, faint, a point pulsed, frenetically like a young pulsar. Its microwaves were blue-shifted to a pitch that was visible instead of audible. The world was covered in a cloak of strangeness, yet he had to have faith that this was the Hero, summoning him back from death.

He was far from home, and had only whispers of breath left. He had used everything in the slingshot passage around the Maw and he did not even know if he had succeeded in leading the princess.

He exhaled the tiniest gasp of breath. Achingly slow, he pivoted. And his heart grew, in a primal way. A few body lengths from him was the princess. He had led her into the land of death and past the Maw. They could see the world of life, even if they were still fast-moving ghosts. It would take weeks to slow down. Her sleek carapace was striped and pitted with fine burns. Her soul was bright, but quiet and reverent.

Beyond her, the great bulk of the Maw had begun to shroud itself again under layers of bright, doomed clouds. The gases in palliative spirals spit hard radiation, but now that they had passed the Maw, their spite was thin and reddened and sepulchral.

The king of the underworld receded majestically. In the last moments of that hypnotic view, Diviya saw a tiny, distant silhouette, carrying a point of hard, hot radioisotopes.

No.

No. No. No. The Maw had scarred them as they passed, and had not let them truly escape. The Maw let through one of its own, an engine of death, a famished monster that had nothing to eat but Diviya and the princess.

Diviya had ceased to sympathize with his soul. In the beginning, he understood it as a gift from the Hero and the queen, as a guide for the migration. The soul was, in some ways, an alien presence, but partly comprehensible within its role as the voice of eternity. But it was pitiless. Petty. Commitment became inf lexibility. Resolve turned to stubbornness. Morality deafened reason. Diviya's soul argued, becoming more shrill. It was difficult to ignore the voice in his head.

In part to draw the soul away from its recriminations, Diviya spoke to his soul about the migration. Skates were taught nothing of the migration. This was safer ground to till. His soul calmed while considering the migration. Perhaps it thought that Diviya was opening himself to redemption.

At first petulantly, then with increasing enthusiasm, the soul spoke to Diviya of what was to come. Even when Diviya probed at the mystery of time dilation itself, the speeds and accelerations needed to achieve the magical dilation of seventeen, his soul answered him. Some of the pieces were symbols, or worse yet, allegories Diviya had to suffer through to keep his soul talking. More useful were the liturgies containing mathematical proportions, and angles and curves. Diviya read meaning into the liturgies that perhaps his soul did not mean for him to understand.

On the third day, Diviya descended from the mound. He left the slums and hopped into the worker districts where tailing hills were evenly rowed and the workers were healthier, younger. The neighborhood seemed lonely. This was a rest period, so most workers should have been back. In the distance, he saw the shine of another soul and turned away, so as not to give himself away. Between dusty piles he recognized a worker.

"Tejas!" he said.

Tejas approached. He had new scratches on the tops of his fins. Chips were missing along his leading edges. "Diviya," he whispered. "I thought you'd been arrested."

"Abhisri got me out a back alley. What happened?"

Tejas had difficulty speaking. The sparks he made were mistimed and sometimes sputtering. "We were all beaten. Most were arrested. I thought they were going to crack me."

Diviya's strength left him. "What charges?"

"I don't know," Tejas whispered. "They're all being sent to work farm number seven."

Dwani's broken face stared out of memory. Tejas sputtered and shorted over his words. "Abhisri got it bad, Diviya. They took out his soul right there. They weren't careful. I don't think he made it."

Diviya sank into the packed regolith. Adding or removing a soul was dangerous. Diviya had done it many times, but had not always been successful. The radioactive souls heated the ceramics and metals of the carapace and the neural wiring, while the skates cooled the souls. Sometimes the stresses on the skate and on the soul were too much. Tejas neared.

"They told me he didn't say nothing to the interrogators, but his soul did. They're looking for you, Diviya. You've got to hide."

"I told you!" Diviya's soul said. "Turn yourself in! Name names!"

But Diviya's soul had no hold on him anymore. The crushing pressure of the hive and his soul had crystallized a sense of mission in him. They had hardened his wavering resolve into the seed of something much more permanent. He was deathly frightened of being cracked open like Dwani, of having his soul torn away, but he heard the sagas through Dwani's eyes now.

"I'll hide in the slums, Tejas," Diviya said, "where the broken workers lie. Send me the leaders, yourself included."

"I'm no leader. I wasn't even a committee member."

"We're all committee members now," Diviya said. "The revolution must begin. Not the one Dwani and Abhisri wanted, but a larger one."

Diviya and the princess had little with which to escape the shaghāl. Diviya had intended to unfurl his sail to brake beyond the black hole, but that would do nothing more than bring the fast-moving shaghāl to them faster. They flew so quickly that the gulf between the Maw and the Hero, that had taken the migration many months to cross before, now took only days. Yet if they did not slow soon, they would overshoot their home.

They unfurled their sails together. Blue-shifted radio waves punched their sails and the shock of slowing dizzied. As the tremendous deceleration intensified and the Hero fed them, they became less ghostly. The world abandoned its frenetic blue-shift. Strange stars faded, their haunted voices quieting. Stars he knew began to shine as if just reborn and the Hero's Voice aged centuries every minute, slowing finally to two flashes per second. Diviya and the princess were reborn.

"We will find a way to survive," the princess said.

No. Not princess. She was the queen now. But no. Not that either. No queens after the revolution. No princes. No grand princes. Just skates, sharing what they had.